SHARE

Monday, November 19, 2012

Global BHL at TDWG 2012

A great participation in Beijing, China.

Nǐ hǎo! Last month, I attended the Annual Meeting of the
Biodiversity Informatics Standards Organization (www.tdwg.org), one of my favorite meetings of the year because it provides a
thorough view of the current advances in the field of Biodiversity Informatics. TDWG 2012 was hosted by the
Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, on Oct. 22-27.

This meeting was particularly relevant for the Biodiversity
Heritage Library because of its role: "Toward an International
Infrastructure for Biodiversity Information". Personally, this was my first time involved as Technical Director of BHL and therefore, I wanted to get as much as possible from the opportunity, sharing the technical work that all my BHL colleagues around the world have done this year and conveying the message of the new challenges that BHL will follow.

I arrived on Saturday and attended the TDWG Executive Committee Meeting all Sunday. On Monday, Oct. 22nd, after the formal opening and introductions and a warm welcome by the hosts and TDWG officials, the Plenary speaker, Dr. Robert Robbins, presented on “How
Diverse is the Biosphere? New Tools, Recent Discoveries, Huge Implications,"
followed up by several paper presentations that addressed different topics on biodiversity information standards, organization
of genomic data, aggregation efforts, regional initiatives and developing
technologies. I presented on the work
done by our colleague Trish Rose-Sandler to define the functional requirements for a repository of citations as improvements to our existing infrastructure in The
BHL and bibliographic citations and
commented on our plans in BHL towards new services in support of a Global Names
Architecture.

Tom Garnett
Former BHL Director

On Tuesday morning, at the “Biodiversity database and
journal interface in e-publication era” Symposium, we enjoyed a talk titled “From
Taxonomic Literature to Cybertaxonomic Content” based on a paper that our
former BHL Program Director, Tom
Garnett and our former BHL Technical Director, Chris Freeland, co-authored in BMC Proceedings with
several other colleagues from different institutions, including Dr. Cynthia Parr from Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

Tuesday afternoon, I was invited to present at the Institute
of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on the latest Global BHL
developments and learned about this year’s activities and future plans for the
next two years with BHL-China and the National Specimen Information Infrastructure. Dr. Hong Cui, Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, was also invited to present on Semantic Annotation, Ontology Building, and Interactive Key Generation from Morphological Descriptions and she was also extremely kind to help out with the language barrier throughout all the meeting.

Art of Life at TDWG 2012 poster session

Wednesday morning started with personal recollections from the organizers and participants in honor of the late Dr. Frank Bisby. Following the remembrance, the Plenary Speaker, Dr. Li-Qiang Ji from the Institute of Zoology, CAS, presented the Bisby Core - a Taxonomic Data Transfer Standard for the Multiple Taxonomy Environment. The last hour and a half of Wednesday morning was dedicated to the poster session where I had the
opportunity to represent my colleagues’ work on the Art
of Life project. Funded by NEH, this multi-institutional project involves participation from the Missouri Botanical Garden, the University of Colorado Boulder, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and other BHL partner institutions. I was glad to see such great interest
in improving access to millions of digital images demonstrated by several of the participants who approached the poster session.

Dr. Fenghong Liu at the Institute of Botany, CAS

On Wednesday afternoon, Jiří Frank, from the National
Museum Prague, a member of BHL-Europe, lead the Workshop “Global dissemination
of natural history content via Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE)” where I contributed
with a small introduction to Global
BHL and Dr. Fenghong Liu from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, presented BHL
China's Latest Progress. Jiří gave an interesting Introduction to the BLE platform from the user perspective.

Finally, during the Lighting Talks on Friday, Janna Hoffman, from the Museum für Naturkunde
Berlin, a BHL-Europe member, presented on Open
Up! paleontological multimedia data for the public. I also took the opportunity to give a short talk reminding all attendees interested in contributing to the Art of Life Schema to please send us their feedback.

As the meeting came to an end, with a feeling of having
attended a very fruitful and busy event, where Global BHL staff was definitely present and very
active, we all said goodbye, hoping to meet again next year during TDWG
2013 in Florence, Italy. By the way, next year's Chair of the Program Committee will be our colleague of BHL-Europe,
Heimo Rainer, from the Natural History Museum of Vienna!

No comments:

Post a Comment

About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL's global consortium of natural history, botanical, and research libraries cooperate to digitize and make accessible the literature of biodiversity held in their collections as a part of a global "biodiversity commons."Learn more. Terms of Use: http://www.si.edu/Termsofuse

BHL Recent Additions

iTunes Store: Top iTunes U Collections

Terms of Use

Disclaimer

The BHL Blog may contain the personal opinions of BHL users or affiliated staff and does not necessarily represent the official Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) position on these matters. Links to external Internet sites from BHL Web pages do not constitute BHL’s endorsement of the content of their Web sites or of their policies or products.

Cookies

We use cookies to support the internal functionality of the Websites. Information that we collect from cookies will not be used to create profiles of individual users and will only be used in aggregate form.

BHL also uses third-party vendors, such as Google Analytics and AddThis, which collect non-personally identifiable information and place cookies on your browser in order to make the BHL more interesting and useful to you.

You may set your browser to refuse cookies from any website that you visit. If you so choose, you may still gain access to most of the BHL Websites, but you may not be able to conduct certain types of transactions or take advantage of some of the interactive elements offered.